When it comes to redeeming for free hotel stays, Marriott Bonvoy is a popular choice. With high value points, and 7,000+ properties around the world to redeem those points, it’s not hard to find a place to use them.
A big change is coming next year when it comes to how you redeem your points for free night stays.
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Marriott Bonvoy to move to dynamic pricing
Following in the footsteps of Aeroplan (and their revamp last year), Marriott Bonvoy is moving away from a chart based redemption system and moving to dynamic pricing. This change will be taking effect in March 2022.
Here is the current pricing chart.
But with dynamic pricing, the chart will be going away. Instead, the number of points you need will vary with the actual price of the hotel.
How many points will you need for a free one night stay? We don’t know, and we probably won’t be able to see until the new system is released.
But based on what happened with Aeroplan, we can take our best guess as to what will happen.
How we think this may affect your point value
When Aeroplan made a similar change to dynamic pricing, Aeroplan points lost some value – they went down from 2.5 cents to 2 cents per point on average.
But the range of value also went down considerably. Before, you could find flight redemptions that saved tons of cash (this one comes to mind), as well as others where you were basically giving your points back to Air Canada for free.
Now, it’s much more consistent across the board (here’s our research you can take a peek at).
With Marriott, we believe it will be the same. Using the charts, there’s quite a wide variety of value when redeeming your points.
We believe with the new program, the range of value will be much smaller. In fact, Marriott right now states that the vast majority of redemptions will need the same amount of points as you would need now.
The real difference will be in their high-end resorts. But for most of us, our guess is not much will change in terms of value.
What happens with Marriott Bonvoy Amex cards?
One big question we can’t answer or speculate on is what happens to the annual free night award.
With the
We suspect that there will be a new cap you can use with these free night vouchers when the change takes place.
Other Marriott news
There are a few other housekeeping items to mention when it comes to points, status expiration, and free night awards.
- First, points expiration dates. All points won’t expire until December 31, 2022.
- If you have elite status, whatever you have is safe until February 2023.
- Finally, if you have a free night award that’s set to expire between January 3 to June 29, 2022, it’ll be extended until June 30, 2022.
Also starting in early 2022, members will be able to combine free night awards with up to 15,000 points from their account, so the certificates can be used at a higher category hotel.
Your turn
The news on dynamic pricing will no doubt generate mixed reactions from our readers.
So chime in!
Let us know what your initial thoughts are on the upcoming Marriott changes in the comments below.
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